Woodlands Solutions
Despite having spent perhaps the last 20-years looking at various shades and varieties of software solutions in and around E/CTRM software, I can still occasionally be surprised. Yesterday I had the pleasure of catching up with Mike Muse, co-founder of Woodlands Solutions, LLC in The woodlands, Texas. I will disclose that I have known Mike for many years and tracked his career through a number of ETRM vendors. He and his co-partner founded Woodlands Solutions in 2008 and have essentially ‘boot strapped’ the development of Phoenix, its ETRM solution. I was surprised to learn that the company already has a healthy client base (just less than 10 Mike reported to me) but rather more surprised at the maturity of the software.
Phoenix is somewhat unique actually as it has a thin client and utilizes a data warehouse/data mart type architecture. This brings a lot of advantages around managing data and being able to process data and report it. The solution certainly benefits from Mike’s previous experiences with a solid set of functionality around contract management, trade capture, Market data, Position and Risk, Credit, Operations, Accounting and Workflow. It features highly usable screens with powerful filtering and personalization characteristics as well as built in logic to reduce the number of fields that must be entered.
Even more impressive is the use of pivot table structures to provide powerful flexibility across areas of the solution for reporting and drill-down as well as the use of graphs to reinforce the user experience. It also features VaR, EaR and stress testing and is quite functionally rich on the risk management side. Of course, there are areas of missing functionality and areas that could be improved but for a solution on which development started just over 2-years ago, it is a very good start.
The initial focus of Woodlands has been North American natural gas and the product would need some additional work for European use but, as Muse pointed out, many of the structures within the solution are configurable since he had experienced moving a North American-focused solution into Europe in a previous existence and kept that in mind while designing the solution.
The solution certainly competes with other systems such as DMS GasPro and Pioneer Solutions but Muse also reported a recent competitive success against some top 5 vendors. From CommodityPoint’s point of view, Phoenix is a very competitive and intriguing new solution on the market and, as with my recent experiences with UK start up, Contigo, and California-based Abacus Solutions Inc, a very pleasant surprise in terms of what can be delivered in a relatively short space of time on today’s more modern technological architectures.
